How big is Soviet/Commie nostalgia in your countries?
July 19, 2025
If you had a comunistic past
7 comments
Fortunately close to none. People that had to suffer under it are still alive and can appreciate not having to que for 3 days to get stuff from a shop.
Something i have noticed is that countries that have not been affected by communism so much are the ones who have the most communist defenders and people bringing arguments like “It was never tested” blah blah
I dont believe that is a coincidence
For my parents’ generation, who grew up in Hungary during the 70s and 80s, there’s definitely a sense of nostalgia but it’s more about the lifestyle than the ideology.
By that time Hungary wasn’t as strictly communist anymore. You had small private businesses, access to some Western goods (even if not from the official state shops) and you could watch MTV or Western movies. Traveling to the West wasn’t impossible either by the mid to late 80s.
So while it was still technically communism, it didn’t dominate everyday life in the way people might assume today.
It’s mostly people that had connections to the government thus lived better than the average person and people missing their youth, not actually missing living in a communist dictatorship.
There’s people that literally don’t know anything other than living in that society, which was absolutely broken and sick and which many Romanians are still trying to get over today.
I guess this would significantly depend on if the said people had positions of power and influence in the communist times. I’ve heard both ends from people I interacted with.
There is a lot of it amongst soviet imported Russians and some among native estonians. Not a lot and always people who were all older adults when it came to a screeching halt. There is less nostalgia for the ideology as such but more, quite surprisingly for the society itself where both personal agency and responsibility were limited so nothing was your fault, brutality ruled supreme and everyone was equally poor and it was socially acceptable to punish on the spot anyone for standing out in any way.
It’s a hot mess of a mentality…
Latvian perspective – Communist and Soviet nostalgia are different things.
Communist nostalgia is approximately zero. Even people who were happy living in the USSR recognize overwhelmingly recognize that communism was an unsuccessful ideology that devolved into all the usual downsides of a dictatorships, without the supposed specific benefits of communism ever materializing. Ideological communists survived the fall of the USSR and were around in the 90s but by the end of that decade they became an irrelevant fringe group.
Soviet nostalgia is more common and complicated. Often it’s not nostalgia for anything Soviet, just the usual nostalgia for being younger, healthier, more attractive, etc. But there’s also Soviet politics and lifestyle nostalgia.
Political nostalgia is pretty much exclusive to ethnic Russians. They liked basically living in Russia (USSR was so heavily Russified that people living in Soviet Latvia could definitely feel and act like they’re living in Russia), they liked being citizens of a superpower. They liked the conservative social politics instead of what they see as Western-style degradation.
Lifestyle nostalgia is the more complicated part I think. As bad as Soviet life was, I can’t deny that it had a major aspect that appeals to certain types of people. That aspect being predictability. You could live your life according to the predictable system, and you didn’t have to make too many choices about it.
How to find a job, how to advance your career, should you switch jobs? Just not a concern – you’d be assigned to a job once you finished education and you could probably work there until retirement if you wanted to. Or you’d be reassigned. Quality of your work didn’t matter, you were paid what every other person with the same job was paid. Where to live? You live in your parents’ communal apartment while you’re waiting for your own in the thirty-year queue. What to buy? You had a much smaller selection of groceries, clothes, toys or anything else, and much of that selection wouldn’t even be available at any given time so it was hardly a problem.
That way, many “life path” and everyday choices were simpler, which was terrible for people who wanted to make different choices, and was annoying to the many who at least wanted more variety. But there’s definitely a type of person who enjoys the predictability of “I’m working at the same factory I was assigned to thirty years ago, living in the same apartment since I was born, and watching the same TV channel as everyone else”.
7 comments
Fortunately close to none. People that had to suffer under it are still alive and can appreciate not having to que for 3 days to get stuff from a shop.
Something i have noticed is that countries that have not been affected by communism so much are the ones who have the most communist defenders and people bringing arguments like “It was never tested” blah blah
I dont believe that is a coincidence
For my parents’ generation, who grew up in Hungary during the 70s and 80s, there’s definitely a sense of nostalgia but it’s more about the lifestyle than the ideology.
By that time Hungary wasn’t as strictly communist anymore. You had small private businesses, access to some Western goods (even if not from the official state shops) and you could watch MTV or Western movies. Traveling to the West wasn’t impossible either by the mid to late 80s.
So while it was still technically communism, it didn’t dominate everyday life in the way people might assume today.
It’s mostly people that had connections to the government thus lived better than the average person and people missing their youth, not actually missing living in a communist dictatorship.
There’s people that literally don’t know anything other than living in that society, which was absolutely broken and sick and which many Romanians are still trying to get over today.
I guess this would significantly depend on if the said people had positions of power and influence in the communist times. I’ve heard both ends from people I interacted with.
There is a lot of it amongst soviet imported Russians and some among native estonians. Not a lot and always people who were all older adults when it came to a screeching halt. There is less nostalgia for the ideology as such but more, quite surprisingly for the society itself where both personal agency and responsibility were limited so nothing was your fault, brutality ruled supreme and everyone was equally poor and it was socially acceptable to punish on the spot anyone for standing out in any way.
It’s a hot mess of a mentality…
Latvian perspective – Communist and Soviet nostalgia are different things.
Communist nostalgia is approximately zero. Even people who were happy living in the USSR recognize overwhelmingly recognize that communism was an unsuccessful ideology that devolved into all the usual downsides of a dictatorships, without the supposed specific benefits of communism ever materializing. Ideological communists survived the fall of the USSR and were around in the 90s but by the end of that decade they became an irrelevant fringe group.
Soviet nostalgia is more common and complicated. Often it’s not nostalgia for anything Soviet, just the usual nostalgia for being younger, healthier, more attractive, etc. But there’s also Soviet politics and lifestyle nostalgia.
Political nostalgia is pretty much exclusive to ethnic Russians. They liked basically living in Russia (USSR was so heavily Russified that people living in Soviet Latvia could definitely feel and act like they’re living in Russia), they liked being citizens of a superpower. They liked the conservative social politics instead of what they see as Western-style degradation.
Lifestyle nostalgia is the more complicated part I think. As bad as Soviet life was, I can’t deny that it had a major aspect that appeals to certain types of people. That aspect being predictability. You could live your life according to the predictable system, and you didn’t have to make too many choices about it.
How to find a job, how to advance your career, should you switch jobs? Just not a concern – you’d be assigned to a job once you finished education and you could probably work there until retirement if you wanted to. Or you’d be reassigned. Quality of your work didn’t matter, you were paid what every other person with the same job was paid. Where to live? You live in your parents’ communal apartment while you’re waiting for your own in the thirty-year queue. What to buy? You had a much smaller selection of groceries, clothes, toys or anything else, and much of that selection wouldn’t even be available at any given time so it was hardly a problem.
That way, many “life path” and everyday choices were simpler, which was terrible for people who wanted to make different choices, and was annoying to the many who at least wanted more variety. But there’s definitely a type of person who enjoys the predictability of “I’m working at the same factory I was assigned to thirty years ago, living in the same apartment since I was born, and watching the same TV channel as everyone else”.